MEMOIR: MOLLY McCLOSKEYreviews Bird CloudBy Annie Proulx Fourth Estate, 234pp, £16.99

EARLY IN Bird Cloud, Annie Proulx's new memoir, there is a passage describing an evening Proulx and her sister were driving in New Hampshire, having been to visit their mother.

“The light was a somber, northern grey, the road blurred with light rain. Fog hung over the Pemigewasset. On the outskirts of town the road widened. We were alone on the highway. My sister was reading a letter. We came into the broad, sweeping curve that follows the river’s course. In front of us, skewed across the empty road, in the smoking-grey silence were two smashed grey cars, pillars of steam rising from each, the road a fine carpet of glass. We stopped. Silence, stillness, all as static as a stage scene.”

It's a powerful scene, come upon in the narrative something as it was in real life – unexpectedly, as though around a corner. The reader senses that he or she is in good, and familiar, hands – the same hands that over the past two decades have produced a succession of exceptional short stories (including Brokeback Mountainand many others set in Wyoming, where this memoir is set) and the much-loved novel of 1993, The Shipping News, for which Proulx won the Pulitzer Prize. Unfortunately, it is one of the few passages of power in Bird Cloud.

It is undoubtedly hard to write an engaging book about building your extremely costly dream house – you want interesting slivers of light, a window aligned with the eagles' perch, a Japanese soaking tub, elk antler cupboard handles – and all the things that go wrong in the process. There is no obvious reason why a reader should care. There is also no reason a reader can't be wooed into caring. But if this is to happen, I suspect a writer needs as much self-deprecating humour as she has money. Proulx has many strengths as a writer but self-deprecating humour seems not among them. (This is a book peppered with such clunkers as: "Books are very important to me. I wish I could think of them as some publishers do – as 'product' – but I can't.") As for the money, we can almost hear the whooshas another chunk of it vanishes – ouch, there goes $40,000 to repair the $11,000 botched floor job.

Proulx bought Bird Cloud – she named her property after a cloud she had seen nearby in the shape of a bird – after several peripatetic decades. She’d suffered countless “awkward domiciles” as an adult. As a child, she moved with her family dozens of times, moves resulting from her father’s attempt to outrun his French Canadian heritage (“a poor, mostly illiterate rural clan of laborers”) and reinvent himself as a New England Yankee.

Proulx was looking for a place she could call her “final home”, a dream piece of land on which to build a house perfectly suited to her needs and character. Bird Cloud seemed to be it – 640 acres of bold, remote Wyoming landscape, accessible only by a one-lane county road, which Proulx knew would render the property “wonderfully private”; in fact, it meant it was cut off for several months a year. Bird Cloud was to prove, in the end, only a seasonal residence. That county road was not, contrary to the assurances of a real estate agent, kept clear throughout the winter.

Almost from the start, there are “landslides of small problems” – inevitable delays; arguments over the mechanical room, the solar design, the neighbours’ wandering cows.

Whooshgoes the money.

Proulx considers cutting her losses, but decides the house must be built. “I began to think of it then as a kind of wooden poem.”

One wonders if the James Gang, builders extraordinaire – they never leave so much as a stray nail on-site at quitting time, are forever rescuing their employer from snow drifts, and never complain, even when called out over Christmas after a frozen drain results in the Japanese tub flooding the library – saw it quite that way. The Gang may not have been as long-suffering as Proulx (inadvertently, we presume) makes them out to be, though it’s hard to tell. Her decision to so often refer to them as an undifferentiated “gang” (a number of characters have cute nicknames – Mr Floorfix, Mr Solar) leaves them a little short of three-dimensional.

Despite Proulx’s telling us that she possesses a “fair dose of sympathy and even compassion . . . a by-product of the writer’s imagination”, what she presents us with instead is a picture of a rather imperious overseer. It’s not that imperiousness is a particularly unusual trait, and it’s certainly not the worst among the sins available to us, it’s just that it makes it hard for a reader to feel that fair dose of sympathy, or even a passing interest in a story that any of us might, conceivably, find resonant: the desire to feel, finally, at home.

And, the building of her home is rendered in too many passages that read as follows: “The Warmboard was tentatively scheduled for delivery through the local lumber yard. Nothing in the construction world can be done directly between supplier and contractor; everything must go through a middleman which slows up the work and adds expense and another layer of bureaucratic confusion. Warmboard was to be the integral part of our radiant heating system. It would conduct heat from warm water in subfloor tubes to the floor surface – silent, efficient and even. The Warmboard itself also served as sub-flooring.”

There are pockets of good writing in Bird Cloud, when Proulx depicts real people in a singular landscape. There is an elk collaring project, and a potted history of eagle killing and eagle killers (Wyoming sheepherders believed the eagles carried off lamb). Descriptions of the natural world stand out: "When the wind blows in summer the entire landscape sways, grasses lean and twist, the willows thrash dementedly. In winter hurricane winds, loose snow loops sidewise in a grinding haze and the whole sky rolls like the ocean. . . " Clefts fill at sunset with a "gel of honey-coloured light that changed to burnt tangerine".

But the book ranges over subjects that are either not particularly interesting, or are potentially interesting but are dryly rendered; the archaeological traces of Indian life on the land, the history of her property, and 40 pages of practically unrelieved bird-watching have an instructional quality.

The language and the characters that lend such a rich and peculiar force to Proulx’s best fiction are simply absent. Go to the fiction, or go back to it.

Molly McCloskey is a short story writer, essayist and novelist. Her memoir, Circles Around the Sun, concerning her brother's schizophrenia, will be published in June by Penguin Ireland.